Just When You Thought It Was Safe... It Might Be

By NED MARTEL

Published: July 27, 2007

One fin slicing the water can ruin a whole day at the beach. But why the hysteria? The first new show of Discovery Channel's 20th annual Shark Week, and highlights from the next six, suggest that you really have to go out of your way to provoke a shark.

Perhaps television is mostly to blame for our fear, replaying the goriest human-shark interactions, stoking terror about creatures who have no taste for humans -- just a killer instinct. Most conflicts between the two species begin when a flailing hand or foot gets mistaken for the shiny flank of a darting fish.

The prime-time portion of Shark Week begins Sunday night with ''Ocean of Fear,'' a new two-hour program -- part documentary, part re-enactment -- that is more wartime tragedy than shark tale. In 1945, attacked by a Japanese submarine, the U.S.S. Indianapolis sank in the Philippine Sea, and the 900 seamen who escaped held on to life rafts and flotsam for what was almost literally a shark week.

For four days victims bobbed above a swirling mass of sharks, who bumped into the clumps of humans, feasting on the stray corpses as well as any flailing ensign who became separated from his mates. This is the scene that the fictional shark hunter Quint, played by Robert Shaw, was still spooked by 30 years later in ''Jaws.''

Over the two hours of ''Ocean of Fear,'' the viewer needs a rest from all the underwater shots of sharks circling desperate men, seen in jumpy, cheap-looking footage. The program intersperses the ''Open Water''-style carnage with myth-busting facts: Scholars assert that sharks aren't really blind, that they remain on the hunt during sleepless nights, and that ultimately they don't kill humans as much as they terrorize them.

That's the ultimate point of the story: The Indianapolis aside, the threat of shark attacks is more imagined than real. A final set of statistics says that only four humans are killed worldwide each year by sharks. These statistics are paired with the number of sharks killed by humans: an estimated 40 million a year. The narrator, Richard Dreyfuss (another ''Jaws'' connection), gives no explanation of who's harvesting them or which cultures drive this market. But such a massacre feels profound.

''Ocean of Fear'' never anthropomorphizes the sharks; they're just a marauding herd. Their two-legged foil is the ship's doctor, who tends to the victims, collecting dog tags of the dead, stanching the blood flow of the wounded. Medically speaking the sharks were the least of his concern. The men covered their faces with spilled oil to protect from sunburn, made makeshift visors to keep their corneas unsinged and pleaded with their parched comrades not to drink the saltwater.

Far too many did, and a horrible subset of the deaths were self-inflicted. (Two-thirds of those who survived the submarine attack died in the water.) The tale is a test of will for subject and spectator alike, as men succumb to delusion, dementia and dysentery. Odd post-rescue interviews -- some spoken by actors portraying survivors in vaguely defined debriefing scenes, others with actual survivors -- interrupt the mayhem.

In the days ahead, Shark Week -- which occupies Discovery's schedule for 18 hours a day, beginning at 9 a.m. on Sunday -- will turn to less edifying stories: There's a near-snuff film of a woman losing her leg to a shark in 1994; a program about a Cape Town family that will put its three young boys in the first shark-viewing cage for kids; and a cross-promotion with the Discovery Channel show ''Survivorman,'' whose host whips sharks into a frenzy so that his arm, sheathed in chain mail, can feel the clamp of multilayered teeth. In this way, Discovery capitalizes on the shark's own methods to make a killing.